For many years, preschool education and elementary
education—each with its own funding
sources, infrastructure, values, and traditions—
have remained largely separate. In fact, the education
establishment typically has not thought of
preschool as a full-fledged part of American public
education. Among the chief reasons for this view
is that preschool is neither universally funded by
the public nor mandatory.24 Moreover, preschool
programs exist within a patchwork quilt of sponsorship
and delivery systems and widely varying
teacher credentials. Many programs came into
being primarily to offer child care for parents who
worked. In recent years, however, preschool’s educational
purpose and potential have been increasingly
recognized, and this recognition contributes
to the blurring of the preschool-elementary boundary.
The two spheres now have substantial reasons
to strive for greater continuity and collaboration.
One impetus is that mandated accountability
requirements, particularly third grade testing,
exert pressures on schools and teachers at K–2,25
who in turn look to teachers of younger children to
help prepare students to demonstrate the required
proficiencies later. A related factor is the growth of
state-funded prekindergarten, located in schools
or other community settings, which collectively
serves more than a million 3- and 4-year-olds.
Millions more children are in Head Start programs
and child care programs that meet state prekindergarten
requirements and receive state preK
dollars. Head Start, serving more than 900,000
children nationwide, is now required to coordinate
with the public schools at the state level.26 Title I
dollars support preschool education and services
for some 300,000 children. Nationally, about 35 percent of all 4-year-olds are in publicly supported
prekindergarten programs.27
For its part, the world of early care and education
stands to gain in some respects from a
closer relationship with the K–12 system. Given
the shortage of affordable, high-quality programs
for children under 5 and the low compensation
for those staff, advocates see potential benefits to
having more 4-year-olds, and perhaps even 3-yearolds,
receive services in publicly funded schooling.
Proponents also hope that a closer relationship
between early-years education and the elementary
grades would lead to enhanced alignment and each
sphere’s learning from the other,28 thus resulting
in greater continuity and coherence across the
preK–3 span.
At the same time, however, preschool educators
have some fears about the prospect of the
K–12 system absorbing or radically reshaping
education for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds, especially
at a time when pressures in public schooling are
intense and often run counter to the needs of
young children. Many early childhood educators
are already quite concerned about the current
climate of increased high-stakes testing adversely
affecting children in grades K–3, and they fear
extension of these effects to even younger children.
Even learning standards, though generally
supported in principle in the early childhood
world,29 are sometimes questioned in practice
because they can have negative effects.
Early learning standards are still relatively
new, having been mandated by Good Start, Grow
Smart in 2002 for the domains of language, literacy,
and mathematics. While some states have taken a
fairly comprehensive approach across the domains
of learning and development, others focus heavily
on the mandated areas, particularly literacy. When
state standards are not comprehensive, the curriculum
driven by those standards is less likely to be
so, and any alignment will likely address only those
few curriculum areas identified in the standards.
Such narrowing of curriculum scope is one
shortcoming that can characterize a set of standards;
there can be other deficiencies, too. To be
most beneficial for children, standards need to be
not only comprehensive but also address what is
important for children to know and be able to do;
be aligned across developmental stages and age/
grade levels; and be consistent with how children
develop and learn. Unfortunately, many state standards
focus on superficial learning objectives, at
times underestimating young children’s competence
and at other times requiring understandings
and tasks that young children cannot really grasp
until they are older.30 There is also growing concern
that most assessments of children’s knowledge
are exclusively in English, thereby missing
important knowledge a child may have but cannot
express in English.31
Alignment is desirable, indeed critical, for
standards to be effective. Yet effective alignment
consists of more than simplifying for a younger
age group the standards appropriate for older
children. Rather than relying on such downward
mapping, developers of early learning standards
should base them on what we know from research
and practice about children from a variety of
backgrounds at a given stage/age and about the
processes, sequences, variations, and long-term
consequences of early learning and development.32
As for state-to-state alignment, the current situation
is chaotic. Although discussion about establishing
some kind of national standards framework
is gaining momentum, there is no common set of
standards at present. Consequently, publishers
competing in the marketplace try to develop curriculum
and textbooks that address the standards
of all the states. Then teachers feel compelled to
cover this large array of topics, teaching each only
briefly and often superficially. When such curriculum
and materials are in use, children move
through the grades encountering a given topic in
grade after grade—but only shallowly each time—
rather than getting depth and focus on a smaller
number of key learning goals and being able to
master these before moving on.33
Standards overload is overwhelming to teachers
and children alike and can lead to potentially
problematic teaching practices. At the preschool
and K–3 levels particularly, practices of concern
include excessive lecturing to the whole group,
fragmented teaching of discrete objectives, and
insistence that teachers follow rigid, tightly paced
schedules. There is also concern that schools are
curtailing valuable experiences such as problem
solving, rich play, collaboration with peers, opportunities
for emotional and social development,
outdoor/physical activity, and the arts. In the
high-pressure classroom, children are less likely
to develop a love of learning and a sense of their
own competence and ability to make choices, and they miss much of the joy and expansive learning
of childhood.34
Educators across the whole preschool-primary
spectrum have perspectives and strengths to bring
to a closer collaboration and ongoing dialogue. The
point of bringing the two worlds together is not for
children to learn primary grade skills at an earlier
age; it is for their teachers to take the first steps
together to ensure that young children develop and
learn, to be able to acquire such skills and understandings
as they progress in school.
The growing knowledge base can shed light on
what an exchanging of best practices might look
like,35 as noted later in “Applying New Knowledge
to Critical Issues.” Through increased communication
and collaboration, both worlds can learn
much that can contribute to improving the educational
experiences of all young children and to
making those experiences more coherent.